Speed through an atmosphere meant turbulence, and the lord knew that to survive, the Headhunters were going to need speed as well as electronics that spoofed the Identification: Friend or Foe signal from the weasel fortress.
Every second Marine in the three line platoons carried a man-portable rocket launcher. ‘Man-portable’ because men were carrying them, not because they were light or handy. Most of the Marines who didn’t have launchers lugged three-packs of reloads.
The rockets were to disable the missile launchers of the Khalian base. Even when that job was done, the Headhunters wouldn’t have to go underground after the weasels: three of the Marines were strapped under 30-kilo tanks of DPD gas—
Which was designed to sink through the tunnels of a Khalian burrow and kill every living thing that breathed it.
There’d been plenty of room aboard the Attack Transport Dalriada, the K435’s mothership, but the Headhuters were over-equipped to fit comfortably onto the dropship itself. Marines squatted shoulder to shoulder, bumping one another and cursing bitterly. . . .
Knowing, among other things, that the weight and bulk of the rockets which the mission required meant that they’d had to leave behind the body armor which they’d otherwise have been wearing during an assault like this.
Of course personal armor wouldn’t matter a damn if the ship bit the big one while they were all aboard her.
The units aboard the Dalriada’s other seven dropships had normal missions: land on the fringe of a defended area and attack. The 121st was different. Last time out, the Headhunters had captured a Khalian courier vessel; now the whole company was shoehorned into a secret weapon that pretended to be a weasel ship, telling the target not to fire on them as they raced down to cut Khalian throats.
There were various ways the local weasels could configure their IFF. Faint lines across Kowacs’ hologram display recorded the burning tracks of the first two drones sent ahead of K435. At the third try, the fortress hadn’t fired, so Operations was betting that K435 could get in untouched if it sent the same IFF response as that last drone.
Operations bet a single hundred-Marine chip. The Headhunters were betting their lives.
” . . . seconds to touchdown!” the flight deck warned. A break in transmission erased the figure, but if they were seconds close, K435 was well within the defended envelope.
“Wait for it!” bellowed Sergeant Bradley over the unit frequency as he saw inexperienced troopers rise to jump out before the dropship landed.
No missile explosion, no hammering flares from autoloading plasma weapons. They were all going to live—
Until the weasel ground personnel got done with them. That was fine. Weasels were what the Headhunters had come to meet.
Too many new Marines on this drop. There’d been too fucking many casualties in the Bullseye operation. . . .
Kowacs felt a minuscule lift in K435’s bow as the shock of the vessel’s approach was reflected from the ground. An instant later, the braking motors fired at full thrust and hammered the rows of squatting Headhunters down against the deck plating.
“Now!” Kowacs, Bradley, and all four platoon leaders shouted as explosive bolts blew away the dropship’s hatches and the 121st Marine Reaction Company, the Headhunters, lurched into action.
The world was bright and hot and smelled like brown flames.
An orbital-defense missile roared up from its launcher as the Marines shook themselves out onto the flat roof of the fortress. The sound of the three-tonne missile going supersonic just above the launch tube was ear-splitting.
A Headhunter fired her hand-held rocket launcher while she was still aboard K435. Backblast made that a dangerous trick—but this wasn’t a desk job, and starting to shoot instantly was a pretty good response to the shock of landing and the missile launch.
The weasel missile tube was built into the fabric of the fortress. The small Marine round guided for the center of the opening, then fired a self-forging fragment straight down the tube’s throat. Even if the armor-piercer didn’t penetrate the launcher cap while the next anti-orbital round was being loaded, it was almost certain to jam the cap in place and prevent the weasels from using that tube again.